Friday July 4th
More miracles - third time this week! Had taken the morning off to go up but the time was mostly eaten by hunting for child car seats and the like, but I did get up for a while. Ground as dry as the proverbial bone: no chance of weeding anything as I couldn´t get the fork in. But did pick a very careful punnet of raspberries for the show (with secateurs) and gave up on trying to get to the green gooseberries as the blackberry thug is completely in the way. Plumped for the dessert goosegog on plot 2, though that was tricky as it was buried under sticky buds! Got a punnet of them, and decided to sort them at home. Blackcurrants weren´t as easy - not many this year, and not very big, sadly. Got some 20 strigs as that seems to be the magic number. But the redcurrants made up for it - why oh why isn´t there a redcurrant class? I´d have entered like a shot. Got lots of those, and then levered up more garlic - deliberates this time - and got several that were similar sizes. I shall see what I can do with those. Tied up the runner poles so they´re ready, then off home again.

Saturday July 5th
Well!What a day. Most of it was spent rushing about like a mad thing trying to get ready for a barbecue with 12 folk coming, but with an hour in the middle for dropping off the soft fruit at Trinity Baptist hall. Realised a bit too late that I didn´t have nearly enough blackcurrants (8oz!) so had to drop out of that class, but managed a decent show of gooseberries, raspberries and the mixed plate though the other gooseberries looked massive compared with mine. Wish I´d got strawberries for the latter - and I totally forgot to add in the alpine strawbsI was going to pick from the back garden. I also asked Mike what he recommended for the monster green garlics: he looked up garlic in the RHS book and it said 12! He overrode that, saying three was plenty! So three it was, trimmed so there was an inch of roots, and about 2" of stem, to prove I grew them.

Dashed back at 5pm to find I´d missed the raffle etc (despite them saying that all exhibits should stay put till 5pm) and that Yvonne was carrying out my plates - with a red and a blue card! Thanked her for rescuing them, and had got to the road junction when I realised the mixed plate wasn´t there. U-turn! Rescued the plate from the kitchen, where it had been put given nobody knew whose it was. Back to the car, and couldn´t resist looking at the cards, then realised I had no clue which class had got me a 1st! Garlic came second in the any vegetable section (not quite up to the cucumbers of two years ago) but not bad! Had to look up the classes at home and found that the 1st was the dessert gooseberries! I beat Vince! Must have been because they were ripe as I can´t see how else they did it. Huzzah and all that. Pity I´d not arrived earlier or I´d have managed photos. Oh well! Not quite as good as a couple of years ago but at least I´d a first in the fruit rather than a second and a third.

Next show is the 6th September. Hope the apples and autumn raspberries behave!